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Large Building Re-tuning Resources

Researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have developed a number of useful resources to help re-tune large (>100,000 sf) commercial buildings with building automation systems (BASs):

Re-tuning is a systematic semi-automated process to identify operational problems in large commercial buildings that have BASs. The process relies on the trend data collected by the BAS to identify the problems. Download the Microsoft PowerPoint® training material slides.

PNNL also developed an instructors' manual that provides additional information on what to highlight in each of the re-tuning slides. This document is useful for someone teaching a re-tuning class. Download the instructor manual.

ECAM+ is a Microsoft Excel®-based tool developed to analyze data (energy and data from building automation systems) from buildings. The tool makes extensive use of Excel® pivot tables to facilitate summarization and filtering of the data. The original development of ECAM was co-funded by the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance (NEEA), New Buildings Institute (NBI), and the California Energy Commission. The update to v2.0 was primarily funded through the California Energy Commission's Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) program, with additional funding from California Commissioning Collaborative (CCC) and NEEA. Version 2.0 also benefits from the incorporation of charting and functionality developed by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) for their "Building Re-Tuning" Program. Learn more about the CCC version. Since v2.0, ECAM has been upgraded to ECAM+v3.0, which includes upgrades to the PNNL Re-tuning portion of ECAM, and the addition of Modeling and Verification (M&V) for meter data. This version can be downloaded by following the link to ECAM+ above, and an updated user guide can be found there also describing the recent additions included in ECAM+v3.0.

PNNL conducted a study to estimate, through simulation, energy savings for common re-tuning/RCx measures. The study investigates and documents savings from a set of re-tuning measures that improves the operating efficiency of large office buildings (>100,000 sf). The re-tuning measures are associated with both air- and water-side HVAC systems.